“I was never good up there,” Ridley said. “I was better down here, always.”
He stepped into the water, and for an instant Mark thought he was going to cross the stream and try to make it up the wall. Instead, he waded away, moving unsteadily through waist-deep water. On the far wall, his silhouette was an enlarged version of his staggering form.
“Damn you, Ridley, get out of the water!”
“Head on back to the surface and tell them all what happened down here,” Ridley said. “That was the job, and you did it. You’ve almost done it, at least. The last part is in the telling. It will mean a lot to people. More people than either of us have met.”
“Then we’ll tell it. Get out of there. I’m going for help.”
Ridley swiveled his head, and the beam of his headlamp threw a glare into Mark’s eyes, forcing him to lift a hand against it.
“I was wrong about you,” Ridley said. “And about myself. I thought I’d have to come back up, but I don’t. You’re the one who has the job on the surface. When things go dark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.”
“I understand. Now if you—”
“No!” Ridley’s voice boomed with a near desperate sound. “You don’t understand yet. There’s a lot of responsibility ahead of you. A lot of pressure, Markus.”
Ridley had never called him that. Never called him anything but Novak. The new man, the stranger, he’d said with such delight during their first meeting.
“Okay,” Mark said. “I’ll handle the pressure. Right now, I’m going for help.”
Ridley turned away, the light traveling with him, and began to wade again.
“Get out of the water!” Mark looked at the wall, searching for any way down that wouldn’t end with a broken spine. There wasn’t one.
“It’s beautiful up ahead,” Ridley said, and then he turned his headlamp off, plunging the passage into darkness. He was out of the range of Mark’s flashlight.
“Travel safe,” he called from the blackness. “She doesn’t want you yet.”
Those were the last words Mark heard from Ridley Barnes. Mark called for him again and again, shouting for him to come back, but the only voice that answered was his own.
67
Searchers worked for four days straight without finding Ridley or his body, but then Sheriff Blankenship called it off, partly, he confessed to Mark, because they seemed to be growing more interested in the cave than in the search. There was a lot of it. Nobody could agree on the total size, but early estimates were high. Maybe top ten in the country. Maybe top five. Maybe better.
It was a remarkable find, they all agreed. Endless potential.
Endless.
Evan Borders was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, when a state trooper pulled him over for speeding and discovered the active warrant. Borders didn’t resist arrest, which was a career first. He was due to be transported back to Garrison County on the same day that Mark left. The same prosecutor who charged Cecil Buckner with the murder of Danielle MacAlister said he was weighing allegations and evidence concerning Pershing MacAlister.
The first lawsuit over the Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust was filed before the search for Ridley Barnes had stopped. The news was filled with opinions on who should have the right to the cave, and legal experts weighed in on who already did and what could be done about it. Mark avoided those stories.
He went to see Julianne Grossman before heading out of town. She was still in the hospital but had been moved out of intensive care, and the doctors were pleased with her progress. She’d sustained a fracture in her skull but there had been no bleeding in the brain. He sat beside her bed and they talked in low voices for more than an hour and several times they paused so that she could weep.
“At first I wanted him to pay,” she said.
“You weren’t alone.”
“But that’s my job,” she said, “to be open to the subconscious, to help others learn how to be. When I had to open, I closed down. I heard what he said, and I closed down. I stopped wanting to help Ridley Barnes when he said those things. I wanted to help Sarah Martin then.”
Mark assured her that everyone had. That was the worst of it, really. Everyone had been willing to help and join the cause. It took a village to kill a monster, after all.
“I could have just walked away from him in the end,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Once he was underground, once he was in trance, he was content. Maybe even before trance. It sounds strange, but it took a lot out of him to get back down there. I saw it. He was pushing himself toward the thing everyone claimed they wanted from him. By the end, I wanted to help him get there. Maybe I shouldn’t have, though. Maybe I should have tried to convince him to just leave.”
“He’d have gone back down soon enough,” Mark said. “Or he wouldn’t have, and things would have gone worse for him up here.”
She nodded. They fell silent but he did not leave. For a long while he just sat there at her side and then she reached out and took his hand.
“Your mind has enormous potential,” she said. “You might not want to hear that from me. Not after this. But... there are special things ahead for you if you want them, I’m sure of it.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything at all.
“You’re going home now,” she said. “Florida.” She enunciated each syllable so that the word sounded like a song.
“Yes.”
“Your firm understands what happened here?”
“They know.”
“If there’s any problem, I’ll tell them what they have to hear. I’ll tell them whatever you need me to so that you can return to work.”
He thanked her and did not tell her that he’d written his resignation letter the previous night in his hotel room. His resignation letter, and a proposal. He wasn’t sure how either would go over, but it was time to deliver them.
“Be in touch,” he said. “And I mean that. I’d like to hear from you again.”
“Likewise. Stay open, Mark. Stay open.”
He nodded at that and then he squeezed her hand and left the hospital and drove out of Garrison for what he believed was the last time. He was headed north to the airport, and from there he would go south by plane. Jeff London was waiting to meet him in Tampa. There he would tell Jeff what he had to say, tell him the truth about how he felt about his wife’s unknown killer, and about the possibilities that he’d seen in this rural place where good but overstretched police could have benefited from outside help from the start. That the questions Did he do it? and Who did it? had always been intertwined, and it was time for Innocence Incorporated to embrace that. He had a sense of how that pitch would go over, and that was why the resignation letter had already been written. But he would do things right, and he would not hide behind Jeff or anyone else. Whether he remained on payroll or not, he had his next case. It had begun on a lonesome bend where the cypress leaves hung low and cast long shadows over the road to Cassadaga.
The airport was far from the town, and Trapdoor was not on the way, but he stopped there all the same. He didn’t get out of the car, just parked where he could sit and look down at the place where Maiden Creek became the Greenglass River.
She doesn’t want you yet.
“It’s just a hole in the earth,” Mark said. “It’s nothing but stone and water.”
But he couldn’t stare too long into the yawning blackness beyond the iron gate before turning away.